Tag: blog

The year has changed and it’s time for traditional retrospective of post done in 2018. By numbers 2018 was total of 23 articles which 11 articles were Monthly notes. I visited couple of conferences and some meetups, did software development and tested technology stuff. Business as usual and I presume that it’s going to continue this way also this year.

Monthly notes

It has been proved to be a good way to ensure that I keep reading what happens in software development and also think about it when I collect interesting articles to my Monthly notes series. The series continued with 11 posts.

Meetups

During the year I attended couple of meetups and if you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I went to more meetups than I wrote about. There are several interesting events in Helsinki you can attend almost monthly but you’ve to be quick to participate because usually events fill up quickly. But although the event seems to be full, there’s often spots left as some people don’t cancel if they can’t make it.

OWASP Helsinki chapter meeting 34: Secure API told about “Perfectly secure API” and “Best friends: API security & API management”. The event gave good overview to the topics covered and was quite packed with people. Eficode’s premises were modern and there was snacks and beverages. And also a sauna.

Have you ever wondered how to become a bug bounty hunter or wanted to organize a bug bounty program? OWASP Helsinki chapter meeting 35: Bug Bounty programs told all about bug bounty programs from hacker and organizer point of views with topics of “Hunting for bounties in a web browser”, “How to become a bug bounty hunter” and “Running a successful bug bounty program”.

In August I attended React Helsinki August 2018 meetup at Smartly.io. Topics covered “Splitting React codebases for increased development speed”, “Making your own Ignite generator – for React Native” and “Use GraphQL!”. There are links to recordings of the presentations.

Meetups and conferences are also nice way to both freshen your thinking, hear how other’s do things, get new ideas and meet people working in the same field.

Conferences

Last year there was lots of interesting conferences in Helsinki. In the Spring there was React Finland 2018 conference which told what’s hot in the React world. The two day conference covered topics of React on day one and day two was React and React Native. The two conference days were packed with great talks and new information.

Where the React Finland was a conference from developers to developers, the opposite was Red Hat Forum Finland 2018 which was held at Finlandia-talo. The mainline was “Ideas worth exploring. Come with questions. Leave with ideas.” The event was divided to keynote and to four breakout sessions. I chose to get hands-on with OpenShift.

The developer conference theme continued in Autumn with GraphQL Finland 2018. The first of its kind event in Finland brought a day of workshops and a day of talks around GraphQL. The event was organized by the same people as React Finland and it showed, in good ways. The talks were interesting, atmosphere was cosy and after party was bookie. All of the talks were live streamed and they’re available on Youtube.

Software development as usual

I managed to write couple of articles regarding software development and topics surrounding it.

Writing documentation is always a task which isn’t much liked and especially with diagrams and flowcharts there’s the problem of which tools to use. I wrote about generating documentation as code with mermaid and PlantUML as an alternative to crafty Draw.io. Using mermaid or PlantUML has the advantage that you can see the changes clearly in human readable text format and maintain source-controlled diagram.

A more practical approach to visualize things was when I did a build monitor with Raspberry Pi and touch screen. Information is a great tool in software development and it’s useful to have easy access to it. Using build monitor to show continuous integration status and metrics from running services helps you notice problems and get them solved quicker.

And as we know learning and staying current in software development is important and expanding your horizons can be achieved with different ways. One good way I have used is following different news sources, newsletters, listening podcasts and attending meetups.

Awesome times ahead

Years change but the blog stays pretty much the same. Also this year plans are to continue as before, write about technology, collect interesting articles, learn new things about software development and of course ride mountain bike.

It’s January 2018 and while I’m gathering my notes for the year’s first post its’ good to look back what I wrote in 2017 and make plans for the new year. In 2017 I managed to write as leisurely as usual and put together 17 articles of which 6 are something other than monthly notes. On average I wrote 1.4 post per month. I visited some meetups, did software development and tested technology stuff. Business as usual and I presume that it’s going to continue this way also this year.

Monthly notes

Writing Monthly notes series about interesting articles I’ve come across has proved to be good way to ensure that I keep reading what happens in software development and also think about it. Collecting articles to monthly post have worked better than publishing weekly. In July I was mostly mountain biking and away from the computer so there was no Monthly notes.

Meetups

Meetup scene in Helsinki has grown and there are several interesting events you can attend almost monthly. But that said, it’s also starting to get growded and events with good topics tend to fill up quickly. I usually find myself going to events to hear war stories of Amazon Web Services, Docker, DevOps, Frontend and Mobile. It’s useful to hear how other’s do things and get new ideas. Meetups and conferences are also nice way to both freshen your thinking and get to know people working in the same field.

In Nebula Tech Thursday – Beer & DevOps we heard stories about “Cloud Analytics – Providing Insight on Application Health and Performance” and “Building a Full Devops Pipeline with Open Source Tools”. OWASP Helsinki chapter meeting #31 presented topics like “DevSec – Developers are the key to security”, “Docker Security” and “Leaking credentials – a security malpractice more common than expected”. Both events where nice and as usual Nebula Tech Thursday with great food and drinks. If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I went to more meetups than I wrote about, like Solita Core and Slush.D.

For making software development more reliable I introduced git pre-commit and pre-receive hooks for validating YAML to our continuous integration process. Validating YAML can be done by using a yamllint and hooking it to pre-commit or pre-receive helps you to automate the check for syntax validity, for weirdnesses like key repetition and cosmetic problems such as lines length, trailing spaces and indentation.

Other things

As an engineer I’m interested of technology and gadgets and sometimes I get things to test. In July I wrote about keeping data secured with iStorage datAshur Personal2 USB flash drive. It is an USB flash drive with combination of hardware encryption, physical keypad and tamper-proofing. Small external devices are easy to lose and can leave your data vulnerable if not encrypted. The hardware encrypted USB flash drive seemed to be quite crafty.

Awesome times ahead

New year, old me. Or something like that. Plans are to continue as before, write about technology, collect interesting articles, learn new things about software development and of course ride mountain bike. The training for the Enduro racing season has already started.

A year has again come to its end and it’s time to look back what I’ve managed to write about and do some planning for the new year of 2017. In 2016 my writing schedule was as leisurely as usual and I managed to put together of 20 articles which nine of them are about weekly notes. On average I managed to keep my pace of at least one post per month. Yay but it should be better. Things have gone quite well, I’ve learned new things and got things done :)

Learning from others at meetups

One way of learning new things is to hear how others do things and get do ideas how to make things better. I’ve found that attending meetups and conferences are nice way to both freshen your thinking and get to know people working in the same field.

More interesting meetup in DevOps field was DevOps Finland Meetup goes Mobile where we heard how continuous delivery works for mobile applications at Zalando, learned mobile testing with Appium and what’s Qvik’s efficient mobile development cycle.

Software development as usual

At work I’m developing web applications mainly with React and Java but looking for better tools is always good. Modern Java is nice but using Kotlin is better although I didn’t get the opportunity to push it into production. Kotlin felt nice and somewhat similar to Swift.

Doing microservices has last year gained more momentum and one good way to keep your docker containers small is to build them with Alpine Linux. Using minimal base image for you container is efficient both on size and having smaller footprint thus making the attack surface smaller. Alpine doesn’t use glibc but musl libc which may limit it use cases but e.g. Java and Node.js applications are running fine on top of it.

In software field I deployed Piwik web analytics as we couldn’t use Google Analytics. Piwik seems to be nice and open source alternative for analytics and has this far worked nicely.

HTTPS has become more affordable and even free with Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. Setting up Lets Encrypt is relatively easy but using them needs also some automation with simple scripts.

One thing I didn’t have time to write was about JavaScript development with React and TypeScript which certainly would be worth writing. Can’t say I like using TypeScript where plain ES6 would work better. Although TypeScript has become better with version 2.

Other things

As much as I love software development I like mountain biking and last year some interesting technology was presented to protect your tires and rims: Huck Norris and Procore. Whereas Huck Norris is lightweight solution to puncture prevention Procore provides better protection and they both have their use cases.

Schwalbe Procore parts

Huck Norris

I’ve used Irssi for communicating with friends in IRC but I also tried to switch to using Weechat. Didn’t quite make the cut and nowadays IRC has almost lost to Telegram and Slack.

New year, interesting things ahead

What the year 2017 brings can’t be predicted but at least my personal goals will be learning React Native and doing some development also for Android. Mountain biking will have a big part in the Summer when the Enduro racing season starts and there’s couple of trips already planned.

A year has again come to its end and it’s time to look back what I’ve managed to write about and do some planning for the new year of 2016. This year my writing schedule was as leisurely as usual and I managed to put together of 19 articles. Which five of them are about my new post series, weekly notes. On average I managed to kept my pace of at least one post per month. Yay. Things have gone quite well overall. I’ve learned new things and got things done :)

Mobile development on the rise

I started mobile development couple of years back with Jolla and Sailfish OS and this year I continued with iOS. Starting iOS development with Swift and Xcode for Apple iPhone and iPad devices has been quite a different experience than using Qt, QML and JavaScript for Sailfish OS. Learning new concepts with Swift and how the App Store works has been great but not always as fun as they say. Especially using the Xcode’s Interface Builder for creating user interface is a task I’m not comfortable with compared to using plain code as with QML. But I got my first iOS application published for iPhone and iPad: Highkara news reader for High.fi news portal. It’s available on App Store.

Highkara news reader

Things on Sailfish OS and Jolla front has been quiet but I did a new game: Falldown. Or actually ported it from Ubuntu Touch. It was a fun experience as I needed to build Bacon2D library for Sailfish OS and package it correctly so it can be accepted on Jolla Store.

It will be interesting to see how my iOS applications attract users and will they beat my Sailfish OS user base :) At least it will be easier to get statistics from your apps from iTunes Connnect than Jolla Harbour. Over a year I have collected data manually and plotted how my five apps have users on Jolla.

Jolla Store statisticsActive install graph

Keeping up with Weekly notes

For some time I have read or in practice collected several software development related newsletters on my inbox. I like to follow what happens on the field and reading Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News is nicely complemented with some newsletters. But that’s not all there is to it. I’ve found it’s useful to make summaries what I’ve read and thus started my Weekly notes blog post series. Although next year I probably will post weekly notes bi-weekly. That’s fortnightly, once in two weeks.

Learning from others at meetups

One way of learning new things is to hear how others do things and get do ideas how to make things better. I’ve found that attending meetups and conferences are nice way to both freshen your thinking and get to know people working on the same field. This year I went to OWASP Helsinki Chapter meeting 27 and got to hear Troy Hunt’s talks of “50 Shades of AppSec” and “Hack yourself first”. It was great event, met old friends from school and the views from the sauna were magnificent.

Or is it?

Agile methodologies are know widely used and accepted but what’s beyond agile? That was the theme what Tampere goes Agile asked this year. It was my first time visiting the event and it was nice experience. The topics provided something to think about and not just the same agile thinking. You could clearly see the theme “Inspired beyond agile” working through different presentations and the emphasis was about changing our mindsets. In short: Agile is mindset. Culture eats agile. no management, no projects. Think small. Focus on benefit. Test & automate. Pair. Liberate.

Continuous flow of waterfall

The meetup scene in Helsinki seems to be warming up and there’s lots of events to go. I didn’t write posts from all meetups I attended like Finland AWS Meetup with Sovelto but wrote about DevOps Finlands’ meetup about ApiOps and test automation. Nice events and good talks later on.

I will certainly keep notes on interesting meetups also next year.

Books on the shelf

I like reading books but usually not the kinds which are technical and you could learn something from. But still I got my hands on “Iron-Clad Java: Building secure Web applications” book which was highly informative and you can’t read it without learning important things about security. In good and bad the book gives somewhat opinionated answers what technics and tools you can use to address security issues but overall the advice is solid and un-biased and more or less framework agnostic.

The other software related book I found myself reading was “Real World Java EE Night Hacks”. It walks through best practices and patterns used to create a Java EE 6 application and covers several important topics from architecture to performance and monitoring to testing. The book has 167 pages with source code so the topics are more about getting the idea than explaining them thoroughly.

In 2016 I will make myself study for the Java Programmer Certificate and read the OCA/OCP Java SE 7 Programmer I & II Study Guide. That’s about 1000 pages to go through with lights on.

Software development as usual

I work as a software developer and it entails all kinds of interesting aspects of doing things. Virtualization isn’t a new thing but with tools like Vagrant you can easily automate the creation of your development environment. And for that you need a base box which you can get from 3rd party or what’s better, you can create your own Vagrant base box with veewee. This way you know what’s in the box and get to customize it for your needs. I used Vagrant for WordPress theme development and later for creating legacy Java EE 5 development environment for OC4J, Oracle 11g XE and Java 1.5 on OS X.

Installing CentOS to Vagrant Box with Veewee

Getting to play with Vagrant and provisioning it with Ansible was maybe the most useful thing this year what comes to development environments. Also switching from Eclipse to highly praised IntelliJ IDEA was great move. Although it took some time to get familiar with IDEA’s keyboard shortcuts. IDEA is nice upgrade form Eclipse especially for JavaScript development but Eclipse has it’s perks with Java and Maven.

One thing I didn’t have time to write this year was about starting JavaScript development. As a full-stack developer I’ve found myself writing more JavaScript this year than Java. Mostly Backbone.js and later got my hands dirty with Angular.js. To manage our build process and JavaScript libraries I wrote about setting up bower and gulp in Windows although you could ditch Bower and go just with npm. So many new tools to use that I think next year there won’t be shortage on topics to write :)

New year, interesting things ahead

Past year was good and I got to do fun projects like my first iOS application and in overall all things went as usual. Work, training, personal projects and stuff like that. Nothing spectacular.

New year of 2016 will be interesting as I just started in new job at awesome company, Gofore. I’m looking forward to new projects and getting things done with great coworkers. I’m certain that there will be interesting articles to be written next year so stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. Check also my other blog in Finnish.

The year 2015 is almost here so it’s time to take a short review what I wrote this year and plan for the next. In 2014 I managed to wrote almost monthly and got together total of 14 articles covering topics of software development, WebLogic issues, Sailfish OS, user experience and gadgets. Last year I planned to write one post per month and in average I got there. Have to be satisfied with it although I could write more.

Looking back

During the past couple of years I have taken part of Fujitsu’s campaigns and testing their laptops and tablets and last year I took part of Master your Business project and tested Lifebook U904 Ultrabook. It’s slim and quite robust laptop with brilliant touch screen although it could benefit from better design regarding cooling. In Autumn I was invited to visit Fujitsu Forum in Munich to hear more about Fujitsu’s services and get insights about what’s new in information technology. The article from the event is still on my draft list. It was nice trip and great to see other bloggers and the project team. In other gadget related topics I also solved my problem with connecting Jabra HALO2 headset with Windows 7. I just had to update Bluetooth drivers in my Dell.

As a software developer I decided to challenge myself last year with developing applications for mobile phones and started with Sailfish OS which runs in Jolla. With Qt, QML and JavaScript it was fun and relatively easy to make useful apps like Sailimgur for browsing imgur and Haikala for reading high.fi news. I also made Colordots game which I ported from Ubuntu Touch. I planned to write more about how to develop apps for Sailfish OS but got around just to cover Sailfish OS user interface design practices and in more technical detail how to debug power consumption issues.

I have been following Atlassian’s Sven Peter in Twitter about how to better do software development so it was great to finally get to hear the talk live when Atlassian’s Get Git Right landed to Helsinki. It was nice event although it had also the marketing aspect about Atlassian’s tools. Nice tools but sometimes the cost is too much. Now I just hope we move from Subversion to Git someday.

I also wrote short article about using Java Mission Control to monitor and profile your Java application. Too bad it’s really useful only with newer JDKs so legacy apps have to use other means like JavaMelody or NewRelic. I also took a short look at stagemonitor but didn’t yet write about it. Looked quite nice for monitoring but not as easy to setup as JavaMelody. Also Spring Boot had nice statistics out of the box but more about that next year.

Planning for 2015

As you may have noticed I’m not a very active writer and technical topics take time to get out from draft to a full article. In the past three years I have managed to write on average one article per month and it seems to be a good target to pursue. Why change something that works quite fine?

For the coming year, looking at blog’s draft folder there’s posts about Sailfish OS and Windows Phone development, software monitoring, setting up continuous integration, utilizing PaaS and starting with Spring Boot. I should just stop starting and start finishing my personal projects so I could add the finishing touches to drafts.

The year 2014 is almost here so it’s time to take a look back and make some plans for the coming year. In 2013 the blog was a bit more active than previous years and I managed to put together 13 articles as I last year promised. Not one article per month but on average :) So let’s have a quick look what I wrote.

Looking back

This year it was my third visit to Munich and Fujitsu Forum. With keynotes and breakout sessions the forum provided a view to human centric intelligent society and how the future might look like with technology trends like Internet of things. It was again nice to see other bloggers and the Fujitsu team, get some insights to ICT and not to forget the hands-ons with new LIFEBOOKS like U904 and T904 and new STYLISTIC tablets.

On software development I wrote on three main topics: testing, monitoring and documentation. In software development the code is one part but also it’s quality and testing it are also essential aspects to make it great. I learned some new tricks with testing Java EE applications and wrote how to start on web application test automation with Robot Framework. I planned to write about how to actually write some test cases but didn’t have the time.

It’s also good to remember that “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” (Lord Kelvin) so I covered it with article about monitoring Java EE application with JavaMelody. JavaMelody proved to be very handy tool to do monitoring in different levels and was quite easy to set up. It can show information about e.g. CPU and memory, HTTP requests, SQL queries, Spring beans and REST calls. And it is said that the overhead is so low that it can be enabled continuously even in production environments.

I’m quite satisfied about the articles I managed to make and especially about Robot Framework and JavaMelody which have been helpful on many occasions. During 2013 I also moved the blog to new VPS provider and although there was also an idea to make a new custom theme, it didn’t materialize. Maybe next year.

Planning ahead

For the coming year 2014 the plan, as usual, is to write approximately one article per month. Blog’s draft folder has some items about JavaScript and charts, Munin plugins and general software development and some sysadmin posts but it will be seen if they mature enough for full posts. I will maybe also write something about Sailfish OS development and Sailimgur.

So subscribe to the RSS feed and stay tuned. And if you can read Finnish check also my other blog. Will the new year be better than the previous? Who knows, but at least you can try your best to make that so.

Again a year has passed and it’s time to take a short look back and plan for the next year. A year ago I wrote that in the year 2012 the blog would be more active and I partly managed to keep up that promise with 9 articles. Not quite at least an article per month as I planned.

The year 2013 is almost here so it’s time to plan ahead. There are already some articles about Apache Wicket and running different development tools on Linux in the backlog waiting to be finished and some technical tasks like upgrading the theme and maybe changing the VPS provider are to be done. Will see if I manage to achieve one article per month so subscribe to the RSS feed and stay tuned.

The year 2011 has been pretty quiet in this blog as I managed to write just one post. In the backlog I have had for some time a couple of articles almost done and several topics to write about but as it sometimes happens, the time runs out.

For the coming year 2012 I have made a promise to myself to research technology related issues and also write about them to this blog and to my Finnish blog. Now I have just done the former and kept the new information to myself :) Including the articles in the backlog I also have some new topics to write. So subscribe to the RSS feed and stay tuned.